You might think the best way for animals to camouflage themselves is to match their surroundings. For instance, in the snowy moorland of the UK's Peak District, this English mountain hare is well hidden in its matching winter coat.

(Image: FLPA/Rex)

An artist wondered if there was another way. In 1909, Abbott Handerson Thayer wrote that he had discovered a law of animal camouflage that "has waited for an artist… to perceive" – namely, that highly contrasting marks in animal patterns could hide their wearers.

These roosting oystercatchers in Snettisham in Norfolk, UK, for example, look conspicuous but are actually hiding. Any predator will face a confusing barrage of black and white, variously angled and constantly moving stripes.

(Image: FLPA/David Hosking/Rex)

Predators search for hidden objects by trying to locate their outlines, so animals' visual systems are often tuned to detect edges. High-contrast markings disrupt the real edges and create false ones. That was Thayer's theory, anyway. His ideas went largely untested for almost a century. Now research has cracked the exact mechanisms.

(Image: Paul Nicklen/Getty Images/National Geographic Creative)

Countershading can work in unexpected ways. To disappear from both predator and prey, some deep-sea sharks use light that they emit themselves, like this velvet belly lantern shark.

To understand how this works, put yourself in the skin of a shark's prey. When your foe looms above, you can easily see its black shadow against the shimmering blue sunlight above, giving you time to plot your escape.

To prevent this, the shark developed counter-illumination, a bioluminescence that it can switch on to blend into the solar ripples. Julien Claes of the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium, has documented this bioluminescence in more than 10 per cent of all known sharks.

(Image: J. Mallefet (FNRS/UCL))

The British navy took some inspiration from nature and experimented with countershading during the first world war. The aim was to throw off enemy estimates of its ships' speed, size and heading. Here, the Kildangan shows off its "dazzle" camouflage.

(Image: IWM/Getty Images)

Soldiers and military vehicles have been using disruptive patterns to hide from their enemies for decades. This is a Lockheed Martin F-16I of the Israeli air force, at Ramon air base, Israel, with a paint job adapted to the desert landscape.

(Image: IWM/Getty Images)

Military personnel are not the only people who might want to hide from surveillance. To evade face recognition and CCTV cameras, New York-based artist Adam Harvey has developed "CV Dazzle". His camouflage technique uses swatches of garish make-up and streaks of carefully gelled hair to break up the usual edges on the wearer's face and obscure distinctive features. This conspicuous concealment has an effect similar to the oystercatcher's confusing plumage.